Borderland Beat

by Alex Marentes

  Operation Cleanliness gave an insight on how "El Grande" managed to formulate a truce of peace on behalf of the Beltrán Leyva clan.

  "El Grande" is a former Durango policeman whom the PGR considered the BLO's main operator in the heart of the country, while Heriberto Lazcano was considered the main leader of "Los Zetas", the armed wing of the Gulf Cartel.

  A person in the witness protection program only known as "David" provided information about a secret meeting in a place just south of Mexico City that had been attended by José Antonio Cueto y Roberto “El 19” who was an operator for Beltrán, along with “El Grande.” It told how they achieved the pact.

  "The first time I spoke with "El Grande" he confided in me that he had been in charge of making a truce with El Lazca, to avoid further conflict and for the time being everyone would be at peace.

  With the arrest of El Mochomo, El 19 told us, that the Beltrán Leyva brothers were very upset with the people of El Chapo Guzmán because they had learned that he had given up El Mochomo and the Beltrán Leyva brothers wanted to take revenge by looking for El Chapo Guzmán, Mayo Zambada, Rey Zambada and Nacho Coronel."

  From previous investigations the PGR had already learned of the pact between the Beltrán's and the Gulf cartel.

  The investigation into the shipment of the 23.5 tons of cocaine that had been intercepted in Manzanillo showed that Arturo Beltran had been the owner and that he was looking for support from Miguel Treviño Morales El 40, then one of the operators of the Gulf Cartel, to assist him to move the cargo to the US.

  Of the cargo that was seized in Altamira, the investigation revealed that the recipient of the cargo had been intended for "El 40." The two large cargos were being transported to a temporary destination in Mexico City where the companies responsible for transporting the cargo were located.

  The two shipments, according to the PGR, were from the same providers: two Colombian drug traffickers who were partners and who were identified as Claudia "El Mono" and a person by the name of Valenciano, nicknamed "El Jugador" or "El Futbolista".

  The investigations indicate that the company Chatzi de México, S.A. de C.V., located in Mexico City, was responsible for putting together the import operation of the 23.5 tons of cocaine that had been seized on October 30, 2007 in the customs of Manzanillo.

  As transport provider "Ocean Trading Limited" had locations in Barranquilla, Colombia and Guayaquil, Ecuador. This company was the one that sent the containers CMAU515156-0 and CMAU501629-9 in the ship "Esmeralda," from Columbia. The paperwork said that the cargo was toilet and soap.

  The protected witness said that the ship arrived in Colima on October 15 and that on the 28th of the same month - two days before the shipment was seized - almost at midnight, "El 40" was in Tamaulipas and was in communication via nextel with Arturo Beltrán Leyva.

  Arturo Beltrán was asking Miguel Treviño if he had a way to talk to the people of Manzanillo, referring to whether he had a contact with customs.

  "El 40" replied that he did know someone, but that he did not dare to operate Manzanillo because he knew that it was the plaza of the Sinaloa Cartel.

  He told him that his Cartel tried to negotiate with an official of customs in Manzanillo, but since he did not accept the bribe, he was told that they were going to execute him. Immediately after hearing this, they protected the seizure.

  After this incident, El 40 received a call from 'El Camello' to collect the money for the drug that was seized the Army on October 5, 2007 in the warehouse of Tampico. El 40 asked him how things were going, and he responded that he lamented another loss with the seizure of the two containers with 23 tons of cocaine in Manzanillo.

  El Grande Dispensing Violence

  Sergio Villarreal Barragán, "El Grande", one of the operators of the Beltrán Lyva Organization (BLO) in Mexico City and Morelos, did not tolerate other criminals to operate in the territories under his control. These criminals typically dedicate themselves to activities such as robberies and assaults.

  Just in the month of November 2009, 40 people had been executed in Morelos, Guerrero and Mexico City, plazas controlled by BLO. Several of the victims were found with messages signed by “El Jefe de Jefes” or "The Chief of Chiefs" (Title given to Arturo Betran Leyva), that said that the victims were "adversaries, thieves and kidnappers ".

  Some federal and local authorities had suspected that several of these executions could have been attributed to Arturo Beltrán Leyva himself.

  On the matter of “El Grande”, SIEDO had obtained testimony from former members of the cartel and also from some protected witnesses who described El Grande as a man that was better at conducting executions rather than being a cartel negotiator. El Grande was known to vigorously pursue and eliminate his intended targets.

  A protected witness known as "Mario", one of BLO's former sicarios gave testimony in the federal case that before reaching Morelos and the Mexico DF, "El Grande" eliminated several thieves in La Laguna, because they unnecessarily "heated the plaza" through their criminal activities and attracted the attention from authorities.

  "Mario" pointed out that El Grande killed three people; Carlos Gavira, Gavira's lawyer and Gavira's sister because Gavira was a person who was engaged in raiding commercial establishments, and because he had relatives in the northeast of the country, Villarreal believed that he probably belonged to the group of Los Zetas.

  "Additionally, Villarreal thought that the criminal activities by Gavira, was "heating up" the Plaza of Gómez Palacio.

  In order to get rid of Gavira, "El Grande" first spoke with Antonio Tagle Gutiérrez, then commander of the Tactical Support Group of the Gómez Palacio Police Department, to plant some baggies of cocaine on Gavira and to arrest him to present charges with PGR for being a street drug dealer.

  But according to "Mario," Gavira came out positive of being addicted to alkaloid and managed to obtain his freedom. It was then that "El Grande" sent his most trusted and violent sicario Claro Burciaga "El Claro" to target Gavira.

  "When Gavira was leaving the Public Prosecutor's Office, along with his lawyer Élfego Rodríguez Galarza, aboard a Dodge Cirrus and being followed behind them by his sister Perla Karina Gavira, Claro Burciaga, along with another sicarios, open fire with assault weapons on Gavira and his attorney, killing them both, this according to "Mario."

  "El Claro" then abducted Perla Karina and took her to a safe house in the city of Lerdo, where she was tortured and killed. The next day they threw her body in Matamoros, Coahuila.

  Arturo Beltrán Leyva “El Jefe de Jefes” had taken trust of "El Grande" when he started as a cocaine dealer on the border with Guatemala, when in 2006 he took control of the drug traffic in La Laguna in less than a year. This was the exact way how Arturo conducted business while building his trafficking empire.

  With a similar Zeta style tactics of assaulting plazas, planting fear and assaulting police commands, he was able to eliminate his competition.

  El Grande was attempting to take control of the city of Gómez Palacio and made it a point to find out who was selling drugs outside of the organization. These were people were known as "Chapulines." This was when he found out that a person by the name of "El Cácher," was selling large quantities of drugs and was doing it freely because he had a relationship with the PGR.

  This caused Villarreal along with his sicarios Claro Burciaga and Arturo Gorena to abduct "El Cácher," along with a companion, whom they later released. "El Cácher" was tortured and ultimately, Villarreal himself shot him in the head.

  Villarreal called several people who were selling drugs in Gómez Palacio, and told them they had to buy his cocaine at $13,000 (dollars) a kilo. Once his will was put in place, about 37 kilos were distributed to street dealers of Gómez Palacio, this according to "Mario."

  Beltran Leyva Organization (BLO)

  The arrest of one of the five Beltran Leyva brothers, Alfredo Beltran, split the Beltran brothers from Sinaloa cartel forming the BLO.

 
Born in the Sinaloan countryside in the 1960s, the Beltrán Leyva brothers – Arturo, Carlos, Alfredo and Héctor – worked closely with Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán, the leader of the Sinaloa Cartel, during decades of smuggling.

  In 2004 and 2005, Arturo Beltrán Leyva led powerful groups of assassins to fight for trade routes in northeastern Mexico for the Sinaloa Cartel. Through the use of corruption or intimidation, the Beltrán Leyva Cartel managed to infiltrate Mexico's political, judicial and police institutions to feed classified information about anti-drug operations, and was known to have infiltrated the Interpol office in Mexico.

  In January 2008, Alfredo “El Mochomo” Beltran Leyva was arrested by the Mexican army. There is speculation that the intelligence leading to the arrest came from Sinaloa leader Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzmán Loera. The death of Edgar Guzmán Beltrán, Guzman Loera’s son, was retribution for the arrest from the BLO. Alfredo had commanded two groups of hitmen for the BLO, and was allegedly in charge of transporting drugs, bribing officials, and laundering money for the Federation at the time.

  Borderland Beat started to track executions attributed to the BLO around the states of Guerrero, Morelos, Puebla and Mexico DF. Executions in Guerrero state had been on the rise over the past three months starting in mid-2009 and getting worst toward the end of the year. Executions with notes accompanying the bodies signed by a mysterious new player on the drug scene, "El Jefe de Jefes."

  It was not until the discovery Oct. 18 of five bodies accompanied by similar notes in the resort city of Acapulco, Guerrero state, that "El Jefe de Jefes" was identified as the leader of the Beltran Leyva Organization (BLO), Arturo Beltran Leyva.

  The notes read, "This is what happens to thieves, kidnappers and traitors. Be careful, Manuel Torres. Sincerely, Arturo Beltran Leyva, El Jefe de Jefes."

  More than 30 executions had been claimed by El Jefe de Jefes in notes left on or near dead bodies in Acapulco and Guerrero state and had contributed to Guerrero state's becoming one of the most violent in all of Mexico at the time.

  The BLO was known to have been very active in the Guerrero region and southwestern Mexico for some time since breaking away from the Sinaloa cartel and Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman Loera in late 2007. The group had managed to maintain a relatively low profile since the beginning of 2009 after a very active 2008, when it organized a string of assassinations of high-ranking federal law enforcement officials in Mexico City in May 2008.

  The BLO intelligence apparatus drew national and international attention when Mexican President Felipe Calderon launched Operacion Limpieza in August of 2008 and uncovered a vast network of federal officials who were on the BLO payroll for providing information regarding counter narcotics operations.

  All of this occurred while the BLO methodically executed operatives and supporters of Guzman Loera in the Guerrero, Morelos and Mexico states in an attempt to weaken the Sinaloa cartel's grip in that region. It appeared that the rivalry had been renewed between the BLO and the Sinaloa cartel, only with a different member within the Sinaloa organization, Manuel Torres Felix.

  Manuel Torres Felix was a high-ranking lieutenant under Sinaloa cartel leader Ismael "El Mayo" Zambada Garcia. Zambada Garcia and Guzman Loera were essentially partners in the Sinaloa cartel. Zambada Garcia's primary area of operations was the Pacific coast from Jalisco state down to Oaxaca, which included Guerrero state, so it would come as no surprise to find a high-ranking member of Zambada Garcia's network, like Felix, operating in this region.

  Other organizations operated in the Guerrero region as well, such as La Familia and Los Zetas. One of these other organizations could be leaving the notes and attributing them to Arturo Beltran Leyva in a tactic known as “calentando la plaza” (heating up the BLO’s town), but given the overlapping geography of the BLO and Zambada Garcia's operations and the bad blood between the two organizations, this is likely not the case (repercussions from posing as Arturo Beltran Leyva would be quite severe).

  Given the violent nature of how the BLO pursued its campaign against Guzman Loera in 2008 and the body count in the current campaign, more notes, executions and overall violence would be expected in the Guerrero region. And further violence in and around Acapulco and Guerrero does not bode well for the struggling tourism-based economy.

  The increase activities in the region of Gerrero was an indication of the desperate attempt to take control by the BLO and this put pressure on the high levels of the Mexican government to take some form of control of the situation.

  One of the most notorious cases of corruption was that of Domingo González Díaz, who in 2003 served as head of the Federal Investigation Agency (AFI) and was close to Genaro Garcia Luna. In the preliminary investigation it is said that La Barbie paid Gonzalez Diaz a million dollars to provide protection to the Beltran Leyva brothers.

  The cell of narco trafficking which consisted of the brothers Arturo, Héctor, Mario, Carlos and Alfredo Beltrán Leyva was one of the oldest in the drug business in Mexico. It emerged in to the public eye between the mid-eighties and early nineties, when Amado Carrillo Fuentes became the boss of the Juarez cartel.

  The Beltran Leyva clan deployed its considerable economic power and deployed their armament to impose their will throughout the country. They had for a long time relied in a strong support from all segments of police agencies, it was so strong that in 2007, José Luis Santiago Vasconcelos, deputy attorney general who served as Legal and International Affairs of the PGR, publicly acknowledged in fear that a group of sicarios under the command of the Beltran had planned to execute him.

  The Beltran Leyva’s were originally from Sinaloa, where the majority of the school in drug trafficking would form in the history of Mexico's organized crime. The Beltran Leyva clan remained for several years as a major wing of the Juarez cartel, but after the death of Amado Carrillo, they decided to operate on their own, although in those years they had already maintained ties to Joaquin El Chapo Guzman, who eventually became their boss.

  Following the escape of El Chapo in January 19, 2001 from the prison de Puente Grande, the Beltran Leyva had allied with him. There was more than one reason for the Sinaloa cartel chief to take them in: it was they who had protected him after a fight with Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, the boldest capo in recent history of Mexico and one who Guzman himself served as one of his lieutenants.

  During the imprisonment of Joaquin Guzman in Almoloya de Juarez in Puente Grande, the Beltrans made sure to supplying him with money and everything the Sinaloa capo needed to live comfortably at the maximum security, ironically known as "La Puerta de Frente" the front door.

  After the escape of Chapo, Beltran brothers took positions in the drug trafficking business. During the presidency of Vicente Fox, they built their power base to dominate a total of 11 states of the Republic, although their main strongholds were Sinaloa and Guerrero but later settled in Morelos.

  According to documents from the PGR, the Beltran Leyva clan directed drug transport operations, money laundering, they sold protection and recruitment of hired assassins or sicarios.

  From the official documents of the PGR inquiry and criminal cases 82/2001 and 125/2001, it revealed that Arturo Beltran Leyva, El Barbas, Hector Alfredo, El H, Mario Alberto, El General, and Carlos, went unchecked for a long time thanks to the protection of police, military and high level officials of the government of Vicente Fox.

  These agreements allowed his drug business to rise quickly and his partner, El Chapo, to become the most powerful crime boss of the last nine years.

  Reports from the Ministry of Public Security cited records that indicated this plan of operations included the District of Mexico for at least a decade. Other territories under their control were the States of Sonora, Guerrero, Chiapas, Querétaro, Sinaloa, Jalisco, Quintana Roo, Tamaulipas and Nuevo Leon.

  The same reports indicate, that in addition to their drug trafficking activities, the Beltrans owned many businesses including a soccer team in Culiacan, Sinaloa, and owned vari
ous luxurious vacation homes in Acapulco, Guerrero and Sinaloa.

  According to a report prepared by the PGR, the leader of the band was Arturo Beltran Leyva. None of the five brothers had been arrested but that changed when in January 21, 2008 the military stopped Alfredo Beltran in a residential area in the capital of Sinaloa.

  The arrest of Alfredo Beltran was considered a big blow against the Sinaloa cartel. The Beltran brothers’ broke ranks with El Chapo because of disagreements about how to run the business and the effects of the break up reached the high level of the SSP, which was mismanaged by Genaro Garcia Luna, who has been mentioned publicly in the investigation as the alleged protector of the Beltran brothers.

  The various members of the Sinaloa cartel, the most organized of all drug cartels, at least before the arrest of Alfredo Beltran were not only partners in the drug business but there were lines of kinship. Arturo Beltran Leyva is a distant cousin of El Chapo who really perfected the cocaine trade in Mexico.

  Another partner of Beltran, Juan Jose Esparragoza Moreno, El Azul is married to a niece of Arturo Beltran. Not much is known of El Azul, but it is rumored that he died of a heart attack.

  The powers of Arturo Beltran in the drug trade allowed him to murder, corrupt and buy senior members of various federal agencies without any interruption form anyone. He is credited for example in the murder of Edgar Millan, the Federal Police chief assassinated in 2008. He is also responsible for corrupting Igor Labastida, another officer linked with the head of the SSP Genaro Garcia Luna.

  Information on reports collected on the system of protection for Beltran Leyva, specifically testimony from various witnesses who had been detained by the federal police and federal prosecutors, confirmed that within the criminal cell there were a network of contacts from the Mexican military who were actively participating in providing information to the cell about operations and other acts of intelligence, including the locations of checkpoints or roadblocks. The report does not mention any names of these alleged "contacts"